


chase it with love

by snsk



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Friends With Benefits, Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 02:30:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5188760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snsk/pseuds/snsk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Friends,</em> Phil says, and they shake on it. Except even now Dan wants to put his hands on the rest of Phil's body, so he can't help feeling slightly false about it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chase it with love

_Friends,_ Phil says, and they shake on it. Except even now Dan wants to put his hands on the rest of Phil's body, so he can't help feeling slightly false about it all.

***

Dan figures the rot started late last year. The _irony_ of it all, because 2012 had been, contrary to public assumption, a pretty good year for them. White lies and small grins and kissing behind closed doors, the whole secret romance aspect of it. Except you can lie only so much before the grin starts fading off his face, and you can read only so much about _Phan_ before you start to wonder who _Dan_ is, really. So the rot started late last year.

The rot in itself is hardly noticeable, at first. Phil going to bed early and not inviting Dan up after a particularly untruthful liveshow; Dan closing a document and saying _Nah, I got it,_ when Phil asks if he wants help. An _uh, okay,_ to Dan's mum when she asks how Phil is. She sounds surprised at the non-committalness of his response, but says nothing. Dan's grateful.

Rot doesn't get better when you leave it be - rot grows, and it spreads. Phil asks tiredly, _are you going to be like this the whole day?_ and Dan snaps, _Be like_ what, and goes upstairs and breathes and breathes through the fear that this is the beginning of the end.

***

 _Friends,_ they've said, and shaken on it, too, only a week later Dan's two glasses of wines too tipsy and his gaze travels up and down Phil's body, sprawled languid on the sofa. Phil watches him staring; heavy-lidded, he watches him come closer.

 _Friends do this,_ Phil says later, when they're still panting and Dan's nose is still pressed to his sweaty skin. He grins, _well - certain types of friends,_ and Dan says _Sure_ into his collarbone, agrees, because these types of friends won't have to stop touching each other, at least.

***

They know what to do with rot; you cut it out. Efficiently. The unfinished arguments end and the silences drag and both the bedrooms are occupied every night. They snipe at each other under the guise of teasing, even in public, until even PJ asks, cautiously, _Is everything--_ and finally Phil swipes a hand over his face, starts with, _Maybe we should try_

Ends with, _friends._

***

Except it's two weeks on and they're still fucking.

***

The _irony_ of it all, Dan muses, is that from this mess a fragile sapling starts to grow. If you go close enough to the edge of the worst there's a sort of catharsis, a shrugging sort of _oh well, we might as well try this._ Dan stares carefully at frames of a video, says, _Phil, do you think this is too over the top?_ and they go to the Isle of Man for Phil's grandparents' fifty-fifth anniversary. They carefully restore the balance of their knocked-askew equilibrium during the day, and during the night, in between the sheets, they plug in all the spaces their friendship can't fill.

And Dan thinks maybe he can do this, do _friends._

***

But there are no rules - or if there were, they're scuffed and faded from all the times Dan and Phil have tumbled into bed and rolled around over them. There are no rules, and Phil says in a liveshow, _Give it a go with her? Yeah, maybe._

Dan, listening absently from a second tab, freezes.

Phil hasn't said anything about it to him. Which probably means it's nothing he's going to follow up on - yet, anyway - but there have been no rules, so there has been no protocol. For all Dan knows - for all Dan knows, while he has been sitting and waiting on - for _something,_ there have been others, inconsequential enough that he doesn't have to mention it to Dan. Still others, who smile at him over coffee and don't have crises about whether their lives are too tangled up with his, if they'll survive as an individual entity if he leaves them, who end up pushing him away because they're too _involved_ and laughing desperately about the _irony_ of it all.

Phil takes him to bed that night, tangles his fingers up in Dan's and makes Dan writhe against the sheets, makes him beg a prayer which begins and ends with Phil's name. Dan falls asleep, overwhelmed, Phil stroking his sweaty fringe, and he wonders how he's going to ask something that might slip his tongue up, if he's going to have to lose _this_ as well.

***

Once, three years ago, on a sun-drenched beach in between kisses, Dan had said _I love you._

 _I love you,_ Phil had told him, then, more seriously, like it mattered more: _You're my best friend._

Now, taking the long way back on an eight degree November day because Phil had wanted to see the trees in autumn, Dan's thinking about the sun on his back and the surety in Phil's voice and how it _had_ mattered more, which is the only reason he's able to ask what he's been sitting weeks on.

Phil turns his head away from the red orange golden leaves and looks at him and says: "No. There's been no-one - there is no one. Else."

"Okay," Dan tells him.

***

They've been _friends_ all along and Dan's been thinking that it was _less_ , somehow, that it is what is left after the rest of the rot has been stripped away. It occurs to him now that it's been the skeleton of the structure, all the foundation they need to reconstruct the rest of it. That without that basis there would have been nothing else. That it hadn't mattered _more_ \- that it is the only thing that matters, really, when it comes down to it. 

Anything else they can build again.

***

And they do. Slowly, steadily, they do. Dan's still figuring out who he is, but he asks Phil for help along the way. The doors stay open and they don't use their words to confusedly cut anymore. Dan's mum sends Dan a jumper for Christmas because she remembers Dan mentioning Phil's obsession with them only about a hundred times. Phil stops tensing up beside Dan when he says _yeah, we're friends,_ because Dan doesn't use it as a defense now.

Dan says, out of the blue, drumming his knuckles on the table: "I didn't understand. What it meant. How important it was. I think I do now."

"It's fine," Phil says, even though he probably has no idea what Dan's referring to, and, "stop distracting me. I had a triple word score right there."

***

And in January Phil kisses him, eyes brighter than any of the New Year lights in the street and city spread before them, in their flat, their home, the rot stripped away to make way for stronger walls and age-enduring architecture. Dan holds on to his hip and breathes him in and tells him, dizzy, when they pull away, not that he loves him; he tells him, _You're my best friend._

 _I love you too,_ Phil says, smiling.

They greet 2014 by shaking on it.

***


End file.
